Jeremy Clarke: I don’t want to lose my grandsons

We were watching Top Gear. I was sitting on a wobbly fold-up chair at a rickety garden table in a newly decorated, though otherwise empty first-floor flat. The garden furniture was there because the estate agent said it was better to have something in the sitting room rather than nothing at all, otherwise the place might have a desolate, depressing air that might put the viewers off. My boy has borrowed the flat from a friend for a couple of days while he considers his options. He, poor lad, was sitting at the table also, feeling the heat and desolate with grief. But he was maintaining his dignity. On the table was a flimsy floral tablecloth, and on that a copy of the Sun newspaper.

‘She’ll come round in a minute and you’ll look back on this and laugh,’ I said. He focused his brown eyes sceptically on mine for a moment then returned them to the irrepressible Jeremy Clarkson. He and his fellow petrolheads, and the adoring audience, which was massed and grinning around him, didn’t appear to have a care in the world, nor did they seem to have the capacity to have a care in the world. There was a very beautiful, sexy, beaming woman in the front row, as there usually is, and I suddenly desired to be her, or to be united with her, with a violent desperation that surprised and appalled me.

The heat in the flat was stifling. Every window in the flat was flung wide open to invite a breeze — though none came. The three musketeers were in Spain racing supercars around the empty streets of a half-finished housing project and mucking about in a deserted brand-new airport.